All posts tagged Louis

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

‘When we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity…

‘The Waves’ is an experimental novel made up of highly poetic, sometimes almost abstract and visionary monologues, delivered by six characters, depicting their lives over 30 years or more as they grow from children through maturity to old men and women. The six are:

Bernard (fancies himself a novelist; never goes anywhere without his notebook in which he jots down notes for novels which never get written)
Susan (wants to be a rural materfamilias like her mother)
Rhoda (nervous, anxious)
Neville (fancies himself a poet)
Jinny (party-loving Londoner)
Louis (fancies himself heir to Egypt and all the ages; acutely self-conscious of his Australian accent and his father a banker in Brisbane)

Early on the image of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five appeared in my mind (Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy) and I never quite managed to lose the association. This book is about the Sensitive Six.

Here’s how it opens, to indicate the schematicness of the structure, and the stilted, hieratic nature of the prose.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’
‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’
‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’
‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’

In her great novels, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To The Lighthouse’, and to a lesser extent in ‘Orlando’, the narrator – or the characters the narrator describes – are continually noticing small details in the world around them: the toot of a car horn, a bird arcing in the sky, a fragment of dress someone’s wearing, the tinkle of cutlery. Quite often the pressure of all these details pressing in on the characters’ senses becomes too much, sensual overload giving rise to a sort of hysteria which I thought I detected in ‘Jacob’s Room’.

In a sense ‘The Waves’ represents the triumph of this detail-noticing approach over conventional plot or characters. The text consists of nothing but random details, hundreds and hundreds of them, described in isolation like jewels hanging in space.

There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots… That is the close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden… The ferns smell very strong, and there are red funguses growing beneath them… That is a wood-pigeon breaking cover in the tops of the beech trees… The lady sits between the two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms… Listen! That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns…

From the start there’s no indication how old the characters are or where any of this is happening: it is a set of free-floating and deliberately random observations which is, to begin with, quite disorientating.

Children

In the event, the initial level of abstraction can’t be maintained for long – the speaker’s speeches become longer and start to contain circumstantial details. We learn that they are all together in one place and are children waiting for ‘lessons’ to begin. ‘My mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child,’ says Susan. We learn who they all are because Louis very bluntly tells us:

‘My father is a banker in Brisbane and I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London…’

But they don’t speak like children at all. They talk in the fixed hieratic style of adults reciting the words of a play. Around the same time Woolf produced this experimental drama-novel other writers were doing something similar. T.S. Eliot tried to revive plays in verse starting in the early 1930s with ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. W.H. Auden wrote plays in verse starting as early as ‘The Orators’ in 1932. Woolf’s characters, also, speak like characters on a stage, standing facing an audience, reciting the words of a poetic play. Woolf herself referred to it not as a novel but a ‘playpoem’. No pre-school child talks like this:

‘Now the stricture and rigidity are over; and I will continue to make my survey of the purlieus of the house in the late afternoon, in the sunset, when the sun makes oleaginous spots on the linoleum, and a crack of light kneels on the wall, making the chair legs look broken.’ (Neville)

They are children talking in adult terms, using adult language.

Starting time and place

We learn that the children are all together in a country house named Elvedon. They are supervised and catered to by an extensive staff. It is the Edwardian decade because one of the girls refers to Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, who reigned 1901 to 1910.

Structure

There are no chapters, as in ‘Orlando’, or parts as in ‘To The Lighthouse’. Instead the text is broken up into nine long sections in Roman text, each one preceded by ten short descriptive sections printed in italics. After a while I realised the italicised sections describe the transit of the sun across the sky during a single day. Not just that, it is the sun rising over the sea, over a seascape, necessarily characterised by waves. So each time we cut back to one of these passages the sun is just rising or is half-way up the sky or stands at noon etc, shedding its light on the sea and its endless waves, and that these also change appearance and character at these different times of the day.

These sections are highly formalised, almost all of them opening with the same key words, ‘The sun…’ and containing some reference to the endless waves.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky…

The sun rose higher. Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach…

The sun rose. Bars of yellow and green fell on the shore, gilding the ribs of the eaten-out boat and making the sea-holly and its mailed leaves gleam blue as steel. Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach…

The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through watery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf…

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams…

The sun no longer stood in the middle of the sky. Its light slanted, falling obliquely. Here it caught on the edge of a cloud and burnt it into a slice of light, a blazing island on which no foot could rest. Then another cloud was caught in the light and another and another, so that the waves beneath were arrow-struck with fiery feathered darts that shot erratically across the quivering blue…

The sun had now sunk lower in the sky. The islands of cloud had gained in density and drew themselves across the sun so that the rocks went suddenly black, and the trembling sea holly lost its blue and turned silver, and shadows were blown like grey cloths over the sea. The waves no longer visited the further pools or reached the dotted black line which lay irregularly upon the beach.

The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness.

Now the sun had sunk. Sky and sea were indistinguishable. The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore…

So it is not just about the passage of the sun through the sky, it is about the interplay between the slow-moving, inevitable sun and the ever-changing sea, the endless waves which, clearly, give the book its title. Right at the end, the text concludes with the briefest of these italicised passages, just one short sentence:

The waves broke on the shore.

So although the prose sections take us through the growth from childhood to adulthood of the six main characters, in some sense their entire lives are compassed within the frame not even of 24 hours, but in the 12 or so hours from the sun rising to the sun setting, as if part of some larger, natural cycle.

No dialogue

I thought the style would loosen up and the characters would get to talk to each other, but they don’t, at all. There is no dialogue. The characters never interact. To all intents and purposes they might be lined up on a stage, facing the audience, declaiming their parts and never facing or interacting with any of the others. Talking of complete lack of interaction…

Aspergers syndrome?

Lack of awareness of others or how to interact with other people are classic symptoms of being on the spectrum from Aspergers syndrome to full-blown autism. Here are the symptoms of Aspergers:

difficulty understanding social cues, body language, and facial expressions
difficulty relating to others
difficulty making eye contact
difficulty responding to people in conversation
difficulty staying on task and understanding or following directions
unusual speech patterns
formal style of speaking that’s advanced for their age
repeating words, phrases, or movements (‘it is not you, it is not you, it is not you’)
hypersensitivity to lights, sounds, and textures
sensitivity to loud noises, odours, clothing, or food textures

These are exactly the traits demonstrated by all six characters throughout this strange book.

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

We meet the six children, all for some reason living in the same house and sketchily follow a day in their lives, playing in the garden, sitting through lessons. There are several key moments: one when Susan sees Jinny kiss Louis which throws her into a rage. One when Bernard convinces the others the gardeners are after them with their shotguns and persuades them to all runs away and hide in terror. Rhoda is described as floating flower petals on the water in a basin, pretending they’re ships, and this image recurs throughout her sections in the rest of the book.

Then (rather abruptly) they are being bathed and put to bed.

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

They set off for their first days at school, by train, so there’s a description of a railway station and a train arriving. The gaggle of children, the Edwardian formality made me visualise The Railway Children, which is set in 1905, so the children would have worn similar clothes.

Train journeys have for a century and a half been the pretext for random observations, fragments seen out the window cf The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. Woolf utilises it to the maximum, here as they head to school and even more at the end of the section, where Susan, Jinny and Rhoda all describe the fleeting images they see through the speeding carriage windows.

There a white church; there a mast among the spires. There a canal. Now there are open spaces with asphalt paths upon which it is strange that people should now be walking. There is a hill striped with red houses. A man crosses a bridge with a dog at his heels. Now the red boy begins firing at a pheasant. The blue boy shoves him aside…

The boys arrive at a private school with its quadrangles, statue of the founding father, promise of Latin lessons, the lobsided headmaster, Crane. The girls go to a separate school. At this point you start wondering whether it’s a problem that they all sound alike and that they all sound like Virginia Woolf i.e. no attempt is made to give them childish turns of phrase or to distinguish between them – the opposite, these children are all gifted with Woolf’s lyrical turn of phrase and describe Woolf’s great theme, ‘identity’.

This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended. I will seek out a face, a composed, a monumental face, and will endow it with omniscience… (Rhoda)

Here’s Louis reacting to the sight of Dr Crane entering the chapel:

I rejoice; my heart expands in his bulk, in his authority. He lays the whirling dust clouds in my tremulous, my ignominiously agitated mind… (p.23)

Although they are given different opinions the opinions are secondary to the style, and the style is all the same. Yes, I think this is a flaw, a failing. Woolf substitutes any feel for how children actually think and speak, with her own lyrical but sometimes ponderous, almost pompous phraseology.

From discord, from hatred… my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. (p.26)

There’s a service in the chapel. Cricket, of course. Bernard already wants to become a novelist, God help us. He is described as turning everything into stories – except that Woolf doesn’t turn everything into stories. There are hardly any stories in her novels, just page after page after page of lyrical descriptions. Louis envies the other boys, the ones with eminent fathers who dominate sports and clubs. Neville develops a hatred for the sign of the cross and becomes passionately devoted to the Latin poets, Catullus, Horace, Lucretius. Susan hates her school and would like to bury it.

Here, as in ‘Orlando’, Woolf claims a character (Bernard) is always bubbling over with stories, just as she claims various people in ‘Orlando’ (notably Nicholas Greene) are bubbling over with stories, and yet… there are never any stories. Not one, not one anecdote, tale or joke, nothing you could retell to anyone who hasn’t read the book. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Woolf couldn’t tell a story – with a beginning, middle and an end – to save her life.

It is extremely symptomatic that Bernard is good at setting scenes but that even he acknowledges that his so-called ‘stories’ always fizzle out, ‘tail off absurdly’ (p.34). What Woolf really means when she talks about ‘stories’ is the unstoppable flow of her own dizzyingly acute observations. But listing thousands of acute details and insights is very much not telling a story. In fact it’s the opposite of telling a story. A story is a sequence of linked events in the shape of a narrative. That doesn’t appear in any of Woolf’s novels.

I can sketch the surroundings up to a point with extraordinary ease. But can I make it work? (Bernard)

No. No he (and she) can’t make it work. Instead the tsunami of details never ends. They flood her mind and her text with a stricken profusion, a thousand snapshots, a million moments brilliantly lit.

Passing the open door leading into the private garden, I saw Fenwick with his mallet raised. The steam from the tea-urn rose in the middle of the lawn. There were banks of blue flowers.

When I wake early… I lie and watch the brass handles on the cupboard grow clear; then the basin; then the towel-horse. As each thing in the bedroom grows clear, my heart beats quicker.

I catch sight of something moving – a speck of sun perhaps on a picture, or the donkey drawing the mowing-machine across the lawn; or a sail that passes between the laurel leaves…

Then their school days are over, and they look back at what they’ve learned. Susan gives a half page impression of London which triggers memories of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Orlando’ before she catches a train back to her country home. And then the perceptions of Jinny, Rhoda, Louis and Neville on their respective train journeys home. Neville is 18.

Section 3. University (21 pages)

University, Cambridge of course (because that was the Bloomsbury University). Bernard ponders how he is multiple selves (the great theme described at the end of ‘Orlando’). He models himself on Byron (amazingly, given that Byron died 80 years previously). He tries to dash off a letter to his girlfriend but is crippled by self consciousness. It is thumpingly clear that what he means by a ‘story’ is in fact a thousand and one cluttered details with not the slightest sense of a narrative. In the same way Louis and Neville both fancy themselves poets but can’t write a line (see ‘The Bloomsbury Error’, below). They punt up the river and eat fruit from a bag, watching the cows in the meadows.

Susan was sent to finishing school in Switzerland but now she’s gone back to her parents’ farm where she lives a rural life, walking out to see cows and pick mushrooms. She wants to get married and have babies, like her mother.

Jinny lives in London and lives for elegant society parties, large lit rooms full of gilt chairs and being swept off her feet by handsome young men.

Rhoda also lives in London but struggles to make sense of her life, to hold her selves together, lacking the rural conviction of Susan or the society confidence of Jinny.

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Bernard is engaged and catches a train to London, then stands in the busy street. All six are reuniting for a farewell dinner for their mutual friend Percival (who we haven’t seen much), ‘a hero’, who is leaving for India. Each of the six imagines Percival acting with godlike decision in India, to sort out ‘the Oriental problem’. They all genuinely believe this Percival would have been a great governor who would have ruled India widely and benevolently: ‘He would have done justice. He would have protected.’

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

News comes that Percival is dead. He was playing some game out in India when his horse threw him and he died on the spot. The Sensitive Six each give their responses which are, predictably, hyperbolic and immoderate:

All is over. The lights of the world have gone out.
We are doomed, all of us.
All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.
I am alone in a hostile world. The human face is hideous.

And so, immoderately, on.

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Louis has become a successful businessman. He loves his office, his desk and his telephone. He’d like to write poetry but is too busy advancing trade around the world. He and Rhoda are lovers. To do this, he has had to deal with the identity problem and from the many men inside him, make one.

Susan is married with babies. She feels replete, complete, and waxes lyrical about getting them to sleep in her country farm.

Jinny, the London party girl, is now past 30. She seems to be describing her life to a man she’s met, including gossip about loads of society figures, but also a lyric delirium about her body and her wish to go off in a ship over the sea.

Neville delivers an impassioned monologue to a woman he has a troubled relationship with, they walked round London together but then she abandoned him at the Tube but later that night arrived at his front door, so…

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

If you can’t think what to do next, send your characters abroad. Bored of middle-aged life, Bernard travels to Italy, to Rome. He is middle-aged and has, at last, acknowledged that he has no real talent, that all those clever hopes come to nothing.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories? (Bernard)

In other words, there is no final statement, there is no Masterwork all these observations are building towards. The observations themselves, in all their brilliant fragmentation, are the work. Or at least, they are in Woolfworld.

Meanwhile, Susan is very content with her rural life bringing up two children in a world of butterfly nets and home-made jam, and visiting the rural poor, especially the dying in their cottages.

Jinny appears to be single but forces herself to rejoice in London life, in the energy and excitement of the Tube and buses and the hectic streets.

Neville feels himself getting old. He’s lost the old anger and bitterness. Now he reads Shakespeare and drifts from party to friend’s house, all passion spent. His section feels more than usually demented, stricken, mad.

Back to Louis who is a successful businessman, well turned-out in spats and a gold-handled cane. He tells us Rhoda left him so he’s taken up with a slatternly Cockney mistress. He is still attracted to his first love – poetry – and fantasises about writing the one Great Poem which will make sense of everything.

Rhoda has been scared all her life, copying the others to give the right appearance of living normally. Now she is in Spain, on a pilgrimage to go by donkey to the top of a mountain where she hopes she’ll be able to see Africa.

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

They all meet up to have lunch at a restaurant in Hampton Court. Unexpressed jealousies and resentments like stags clashing antlers.

Neville despises Susan for waking up every morning to the same husband, when he has a succession of different women, sensations and conversations every season.

Louis wants everyone to notice his smart clothes and success and yet feels the perennial outsider.

Jinny wants them to acknowledge her fascination with people and life.

Rhoda is terrified of the simplest things and imagines her bed at night falling over the edge of the world. She’s the most mental of the lot:

After all these callings hither and thither, these pluckings and searchings, I shall fall alone through this thin sheet into gulfs of fire. And you will not help me. More cruel than the old torturers, you will let me fall, and will tear me to pieces when I am fallen. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. (Rhoda)

And indeed, right at the end of the book, in a throwaway remark, Bernard indicates that Rhoda kills herself: Woolf’s avatar, in this respect. She jumped out the upper story of a house to her death, as Woolf tried to when she was 13…

As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome

Then they all go for a wistful sad walk by the river, arm in arm and hand in hand.

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Oddly and disappointingly a lot of this final section consists of a recapitulation of stuff we’ve read before.

Woolf has finished with all the other characters, we see and hear them no more, but for Bernard. This section consists entirely of Bernard’s voice and lugubrious reminiscences. It consists of him addressing someone over a meal in the West End, a barely known stranger he remembers boarding a ship to Africa with years ago and has recently bumped into, a virtual stranger to tell his life story and the story of the six characters to. So the text finishes with Bernard ‘winning’ and his version of events being the crowning and defining one. Shame. I preferred the women characters, Susan, Rhoda and Jinny. Tant pis.

Early on in his 40-page monologue, Bernard complains that he’s fed up of telling ‘so many stories’. This is a bit rich seeing as how nowhere at all has there been an indication of him producing even a half-decent anecdote let alone a full-blown story.

He also says he is sick of flamboyantly beautiful phrases, which is maybe Woolf being ironic against herself, seeing as Woolf is praised above all for her lyrical (and often delirious) prose style, and this book consists entirely of fine phrases almost completely bereft of plot, event or psychology. (I say bereft of psychology because, despite a handful of superficial differences, all the characters think and speak exactly like Virginia Woolf.)

Anyway, all Bernard does, at great length, is recapitulate many of the scenes we have already had described to us, described in the childhood, school and university sections. But a scene is not a story, it is just a scene. Repeatedly telling us that Rhoda liked stirring flower petals in a basin and Neville like the Roman poets is not a story, it is creating images which, through repetition, acquire a kind of talismanic power. (Woolf does it in her factual works, as well, for example the image of the officious beadle who shooed her off a lawn in Cambridge which is repeated throughout ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and even in ‘Three Guineas’ to become a kind of looming symbol of the patriarchy.)

And on and on it goes, by far the longest section of the book and essentially a recapitulation of everything we’ve heard before. Tragically, as I’ve mentioned, as he gets towards the end of this bald list of impressions and mild events, he says ‘that’s enough of stories’ and the reader thinks ‘what stories?’ His idea of a story seems to be that Percival died when his horse threw him. Not a scintillating story, is it? Not the most complex of narratives. Woolf is the great writer of anti-stories.

Another one of his cracking stories, so good he repeats it half a dozen times, is that once, Percival invited him to accompany him to Hampton Court but he said no. That’s it. Not the ‘Thousand and One Nights’, is it? It’s more of a motif, a (very small) incident which Bernard keeps remembering and which comes to haunt him. But a story it is not.

This long final section not only recapitulates many of the events (to over-describe them), the feelings and intuitions of the previous chapters, it makes great play of repeating certain memories which have become recurring motifs – like Jinny kissing Louis, Rhoda sailing her flower-petal boats, Bernard turning down Percival’s invitation to go to Hampton Court – and alongside this, repeating certain key phrases. Presumably the intention is to give them a kind of poetic or psychological charge, but I found it just made them more and more inconsequential, like the harmless words of a lullaby.

The mind grows rings… the being grows rings… The being grows rings, like a tree…
Life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday… Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday… I put on my hat, and went out to earn my living. After Monday, Tuesday comes… Life is pleasant; life is good. After Monday comes Tuesday, and Wednesday follows…

Empty rhythmic lulling, like the waves which wash across the empty beach, slowly wearing the mind down into utter indifference.

Right at the very end, on the last few pages, Bernard describes an epiphany he had in the countryside, leaning on a gate looking out over a valley, when he felt like his ‘self’ disappear completely, with the result that he blundered on through the countryside, a man without a self.

Now, here, in this restaurant off Shaftesbury Avenue, he begins to doubt the reality of the here and now. And then wonders if any of them are real. Who is he? Maybe he’s not one of them, Bernard, but all of them, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis?

As I talked I felt ‘I am you’. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome…

It’s the same theme which surfaced towards the end of ‘Orlando’, the suggestion that our so-called identities are almost infinitely malleable and interchangeable.

On the very last page of the book Bernard explains that no matter how old and tired you are, each day the waves come and lift you to start the day again, dawn, rising from your bed, breakfast and the whole day to be faced again. Again and again we are lifted and propelled forward by the endless waves.

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.

For the waves endlessly driving us forward are life, and the only enemy of all of this, of this long, dense, verbose, lyrical, empty-headed text, is death. So down with death and on with life, and its endless waves.

Sex

There is no sex. The six characters go through puberty, adolescence and young adulthood without developing genitals, bodily hair, breasts, discovering masturbation, orgasms or having sex. None of them lose their virginities, they just marry and have children without the apparent involvement of sex at all.

Woolf was a Victorian lady. Like most of her class and generation she was too well bred to mention sex. But she also had a personal aversion to it, as well. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of her husband, Leonard Woolf, tells us that every time he broached the subject early on in the marriage, presumably with kissing and touching etc, she began to have a panic attack, beginning to display the symptoms of her full-blown madness. Understandably, he backed off and after a while, stopped trying, and so the marriage was never consummated.

Hence the strange absence of any sexual drive in any of her novels. The entire thing repelled her, was alien to her, she knew nothing about it, and so couldn’t write about it. Hence the impression all her books give of valuing a certain kind of billowing, purely verbal lyricism above anything to do with the body.

(Hence also her revulsion at James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ with its vivid descriptions of physical activities – not just the sexual ones, but peeing and defecating. She realised ‘Ulysses’ was a great book but couldn’t overcome the revulsion of her class at the vulgar goings-on of plebeians, and the revulsion peculiar to her against any descriptions of human corporeality. Taken together this explains why she couldn’t get past its ‘obscenity’. It’s a big blind spot.)

On the broader issue of physicality, none of the six characters have any physical oddities or ever become ill. That would drag the narrative down into the realm of the physical and, on one level, all of Woolf’s works are attempts to fly above and deny human physicality.

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am. (Bernard)

Woolf was stricken throughout her life with mental illness, nowadays through to be bipolar disease, striking her down with sustained periods of depression shelving into mania and madness. It’s fairly obvious that a lot of the heightened and often dissociated perceptions which litter her books derive from her own experience of altered psychological states, what Bernard calls his ‘states of detachment.’

Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy… (Bernard)

There is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. (Bernard)

Woolf triumphed by turning her illness into a style, into a worldview. Still, some passages stick out as more than usually deranged, vividly describing the alienated, dissociated effects of mental illness.

I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance; I never cease to move and to dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. I dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. (Jinny)

‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder – that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. (Rhoda)

There is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. (Rhoda)

Is it significant, maybe, that these shimmering states of mind are assigned to the girls? No. Bernard feels just the same if not more so. In fact all six characters routinely feel like this. Sometimes the descriptions dwindle down to something approaching a catalogue of symptoms more than anything else:

I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion. I imagine these nameless, these immaculate people, watching me from behind bushes.

I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Unstoppable images

More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images. (Neville)

So many times it feels as if Woolf is barely in control of the never-ceasing bubbling up of images and similes which throng her mind, all the characters plight of being incurably ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of one thing, one object in particular’.

I feel at once, as I sit down at a table, the delicious jostle of confusion, of uncertainty, of possibility, of speculation. Images breed instantly. (Bernard)

The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan; image on top of image. I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another. (Bernard)

Endless lists, lists, lists of things seen, random collocations:

People holding forth under chandeliers in full evening dress, wearing stars and decorations, some spray in a hedge, or a sunset over a flat winter field, or the way some old woman sits, arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket… (Neville)

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter – all are stories. (Bernard)

A view over chimneypots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney-stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel. (Louis)

Sometimes it feels claustrophobic, makes you want to put down the book and run out into the fresh air in order to escape the relentless bombardment of her text. And in some places the characters express the same sense of borderline hysteria:

I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate… (Rhoda)

So Woolf’s texts are matrices of these never-ending perceptions oppressing characters who can never switch off, never lose themselves in action or laughter or any physical activity, trapped in consciousnesses endlessly enmeshed and enmeshing themselves:

Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments and construct a system. (Neville)

And always watching themselves like hawks, afflicted with never-ending bombardment of brilliant and oppressive images till they feel like they’re going to burst.

I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. (Jinny)

There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. (Rhoda)

Identity(ies)

Which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. (Bernard)

Who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? (Susan)

What am I? There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything?(Bernard)

The characters are continually assailed by the fragility of their own identity, rarely if ever feeling their ‘true’ selves, struggling to define what a true self even is.

In the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels. (Rhoda)

I am the ghost of Louis, an ephemeral passer-by, in whose mind dreams have power, and garden sounds when in the early morning petals float on fathomless depths and the birds sing. I dash and sprinkle myself with the bright waters of childhood. Its thin veil quivers. (Louis)

I feel insignificant, lost… I will let the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult… The huge uproar is in my ears… We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes… (Neville)

I am more selves than Neville thinks. (Bernard)

The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. (Bernard)

The ‘message’ of the last part of ‘Orlando’ is not that we are male or female, or even made up of aspects of male and female mingled, but instead that we have scores, hundreds, maybe thousands of selves, which all appear, mix and mingle continuously. Same here. It is Woolf’s central theme and message, expressed again and again and again:

‘What am I?’ I ask. ‘This? No, I am that.’ Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. (Bernard)

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. (Neville)

Alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of my fleet of ships. But here, twisting the tassels of this brocaded curtain in my hostess’s window, I am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one. (Rhoda)

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. (Bernard)

The Bloomsbury Error

Bernard, Louis and Neville are convinced they are going to be Great Novelists and Poets because of the depth and sincerity of their perceptions, just as Lily Briscoe in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is convinced she will be a great painter because of the vividness with which she perceives things.

Wrong. Just because you feel things deeply doesn’t mean you can express them well. The latter, especially being a poet and an artist, are matters of technique rather than feeling. It’s not clear that John Singer Sargent perceived things particularly strongly, it was his technique which makes him a master painter. (I think of Sargent because the old Granada paperback of ‘The Waves’ which I own has a painting by him, The Black Brook, on the cover.) Ditto what made T.S. Eliot the giant poet he was, wasn’t his depth of feeling (though he harboured terrible depths of feeling) but the dazzling effectiveness of his phrasing. It’s not about feeling, it’s about technique, craft, skill.

What makes reading a bunch of Virginia Woolf novels back to back a bit tedious is her unchanging, unevolving, naive conviction that deep feeling must inevitably lead to the ability to write Great Novels or Great Poetry. It is a fundamental error but one she apparently held and makes all her characters hold.

It is boring reading Bernard and Louis and Neville going on and on and on about how wonderfully intensely they feel things and yet, when they try to get them down on paper, their stories or attempts at poetry just fizzle out. It’s because they’re making the fundamental Bloomsbury Error of confusing deep feeling with artistic ability. It’s not clear that Picasso had particularly fine and sensitive feelings, in fact all the evidence suggests the opposite. Yet he had breath-taking technique which made him the artist of the century. QED.

Death and travel as basic narrative devices

The only significant things which happen in a Woolf novel are death and travel. Having run out of ideas what to do with Jacob in ‘Jacob’s Room’, she packs him off to Italy and Greece, ending up in Constantinople. Unsure how to end it, she simply has him killed off in the Great War.

The meandering mellifluousness of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ builds to an unexpectedly harsh climax with the suicide of Septimus Smith, which overshadows the book’s ending and Mrs Dalloway’s party. Arguably it’s a regrettable stain on an otherwise charming Cath Kidston drawing room of a book.

The dominating event in ‘To The Lighthouse’ is the death in the intermezzo of Mrs Ramsay, which completely changes the flavour of the book and dictates the events of the final part (the journey to the lighthouse undertaken as a sort of penance).

At a loss what to do with Orlando, Woolf has the bright idea of packing him off to Constantinople, ostensibly as British Ambassador and it’s here, abroad, that the decisive event of the book takes place, Orlando’s transformation from a man into a woman. (‘Orlando’ is by way of being the exception that proves the rule, in having no death of a major character; in fact part of the joke is that the central characters very much don’t die but live for hundreds of years.)

Here, in ‘The Waves’, first she bumps off the rather obscure character Percival, who all the others loved but whose voice we never hear; then she sends Bernard off to Rome, admittedly a minor excursion; but then, towards the end, in a throwaway remark we learn that the attractive character Rhoda has killed herself. So it was these deaths and excursions which triggered the reflections that death and travel are Woolf’s only two narrative devices.

Secondary characters

For me, the secondary or tertiary characters in a Woolf novel have a special interest, the characters which peep round from behind the curtain of the main narrative. It’s especially true of the servants, the unspeaking lackeys whose reliable labours enable the privileged lives of the main characters. As I argued in some of my reviews of E.M. Forster, I think part of the reason these classic novels are so enduringly popular derives from the way they provide the reader with the lovely, consoling, escapist fantasy that we, the readers, while we are immersed in the narrative, are living just such a pampered, privileged life – surrounded by cooks and cleaners and maids and servants to cater to our every whim, our only worries which shoes to wear with this skirt and who to invite to dinner. They’re the literary equivalent of the Sunday Times Luxury section.

There’s another aspect of the supporting characters which is how many there are. All of her novels rotate around a handful of main characters, as most novels do, but in each one I’ve been struck by the sheer number of tertiary characters she bothers to identify and name. Here’s a list of tertiary characters in ‘The Waves’:

Two gardeners sweeping the lawn with brooms
Miss Hudson the teacher
Miss Curry, another teacher
The cook
Florrie, a maid
Ernest, a male servant
Mrs Constable, who bathes the children
George, a servant with bandy legs who carries Bernard’s suitcase
The housemaid cleaning the steps
The boot-boy made love to the scullery-maid in the kitchen garden
The stableboy
The railway guard blowing his whistle
The headmaster, Old Crane
Mrs Crane, his wife, fan of French memoirs
The boy who Susan leaves her squirrel (in a cage) and her doves to
The fat woman, presumably the matron at the boys’ school
Teachers at the boys’ school: Mr Barker, Mr Wickham
Older boys, the ‘boasting boys’, at the boys’ school: Larpent, Smith, Archie, Hugh, Parker, Dalton, Fenwick, Baker, Roper
Teachers at the girls’ school: Miss Lambert, Madame Carlo the music teacher, Miss Matthews, Miss Cutting and Miss Bard
Lady Hampton, wife of General Hampton, one of the boys’ school governors (?)
Boys at university: Simes, Billy Jackson, Canon, Lycett, Peters, Hawkins, Larpent, Neville
Mrs Moffat, Bernard’s cleaner at university
Miss Johnson, Louis’s secretary
Louis’s business associates: Mr Burchard, Mr Prentice, Mr Eyres
Bernard’s parlourmaid
Bernard’s hairdresser

Conclusion

Despite dwelling at length on what I take to be its shortcomings and limitations, the overall impression of reading ‘The Waves’ is strange and haunting. It is an awesome book and Woolf was a great, great writer.

Credit

‘The Waves’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1931. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

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1920s reviews

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by Simon on April 7, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged Africa, Archie, Aspergers syndrome, Baker, Bernard, Billy Jackson, bipolar disease, Brisbane, Cambridge, Canon, Catullus, Constantinople, Dalton, Depression, Dr Crane, E.M. Forster, Elvedon, English literature, Enid Blyton, Ernest, experimental fiction, experimental literature, experimental novel, Famous Five, Fenwick, Florrie, General Hampton, George, Great War, Hampton Court, Hawkins, Horace, Hugh, identity, India, Italy, Jacob's Room, James Joyce, Jinny, John Singer Sargent, King Edward VII, Lady Hampton, Larpent, Lily Briscoe, London, Louis, Lucretius, Lycett, Madame Carlo, madness, mania, mental illness, Miss Bard, Miss Curry, Miss Cutting, Miss Hudson, Miss Johnson, Miss Lambert, Miss Matthews, monologue, Mr Barker, Mr Burchard, Mr Eyres, Mr Prentice, Mr Wickham, Mrs Constable, Mrs Crane, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Moffat, Mrs Ramsay, Neville, novel, Orlando, Parker, Percival, Peters, Philip Larkin, Picasso, playpoem, poetry, Queen Alexandra, Rhoda, Rome, Roper, selves, Sensitive Six, sex, Shaftesbury Avenue, Shakespeare, Simes, Smith, states of detachment, Sunday Times, Susan, Sweeney Agonistes, T.S. Eliot, The Bloomsbury Error, The Orators, the Oriental problem, The Railway Children, the Tube, The Waves, The Whitsun Weddings, Thousand and One Nights, To The Lighthouse, Ulysses, W.H. Auden, West End, Woolfworld

Posted by Simon on April 7, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/the-waves-virginia-woolf/

The Toys of Peace by Saki (1919)

Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton, had always looked indulgently on the country as a place where people of irreproachable income and hospitable instincts cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens and Jacobean pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested week-end guests might disport themselves.
(For the Duration of the War)

‘I’m afraid there is nowhere for you to sit,’ I said coldly; ‘the verandah is full of goats.’
(The Guests)

Biographical sketch

Saki, or to give him his proper name, Hector Hugh Munro, volunteered for the army as soon as the Great War broke out in August 1914. Born in December 1870, he was 43 at the time and so, officially, over-age to enlist. It took a lot of effort and pulling strings before he managed to secure a place in the Second King Edward’s Horse. Finding a cavalry regiment too demanding for his age, Hector later transferred to an infantry regiment, the the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, and finally made his way to the Western Front in 1916.

The most striking fact about Saki’s war service was that although, because of his class and education, he was repeatedly offered the chance of a commission or a cushy job at the rear, he turned all these offers down and preferred serving as a common private, and then lance sergeant, among the men he grew to love. He was shot through the head at Beaumont-Hamel on the morning of 14 November 1916.

All this and more is detailed in a biographical note by Rothay Reynolds which stands at the head of this collection of 31 of Saki’s short stories which was published posthumously in 1919. And it adds considerable bite to the first story in the set, which gives its name to the entire volume and is about the pointlessness of denying men and boys’ natural instinct for war.

The stories

For each of the stories I give the briefest possible summary and sometimes add a quote which exemplifies Saki’s dry and macabre humour, often, especially when casually dealing with exotic animals, bordering on the surreal.

The Toys of Peace

The title is quite literal. Eleanor Bope complains to her brother, Harvey, that her sons (‘Eric, not eleven yet, and Bertie, only nine-and-a-half’) only ever play at war, with soldier toys. Next time he visits can he please bring some toys which emphasise the virtues of peace? So, in a comic scene, on his next visit, Harvey unveils to the two boys such delights as models of the Manchester branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, of a school of art and a public library, and little figures of John Stuart Mill, Robert Raikes (the founder of Sunday schools), a sanitary inspector, a district councillor and an official of the Local Government Board. He leaves the boys with their perplexing toys of peace, to take a break in the library. Half an hour later Harvey returns to find the boys have converted the models into forts and castles, repainted the figures as soldiers with lashings of red paint for blood, and are acting out gruesome battle scenes.

Louise (Clovis)

Jane Thropplestance is the most forgetful woman in the world. When she returns from a shopping expedition her sister, the elderly Dowager Lady Beanford, asks her what she has done with her niece, Louise. ‘Good gracious,’ Miss Thropplestance replies, ‘I must have mislaid her!’ and then proceeds to review all the shops and social calls she made during the afternoon, where she might, possibly, have mislaid, poor inoffensive Louise.

It’s an inadvertently hilarious list, bringing out Jane’s flaky superficiality, with plenty of humorous phrases where mislaying a niece is placed on the same level as losing your keys.

The comic punchline comes when the butler informs the two ladies that Louise, in fact, never went out with Miss Thropplestance in the first place and has spent the afternoon reading an improving book to a sick servant upstairs. Silly billies.

Tea

James Cushat-Prinkly is a dim 34-year-old and his extended family of females think it really is time he settled down and proposed to someone. His female family and friends settle on Joan Sebastable as being the perfect match. So one afternoon he sets off to walk across Hyde Park to the Mayfair residence of Miss Sebastaple to propose.

But when he glances at his watch he notices it is 4.30 which means the dreaded hour of afternoon tea is approaching. James hates afternoon tea with its rituals of tinkling tea glasses and endless stupid questions about whether you’d prefer milk or cream and how many lumps and so on. In order to avoid confronting his beloved crouching behind the wretched tea things, he drops in on an acquaintance who happens to live en route, ‘Rhoda Ellam, a sort of remote cousin, who made a living by creating hats out of costly materials.’ Rhoda is serving up tea (this is England, after all) but is much more relaxed about the whole thing, asking James to grab a mug if he can see one and quickly knocking up some bread and butter.

Result: James strolls home and informs his astonished womenfolk that the proposal went well and now he is engaged to be married to…Rhoda Ellam! In fact that isn’t the end of the story. The very end comes when, after getting married and going on honeymoon etc, the couple return to London and at their first tiffin, James discovers to his dismay, that Rhoda has arranged best quality tea things in exactly the way all other women do, has become completely conventional. You can’t beat tiffin!

The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh

Two English chaps, a Journalist and a Wine Merchant, are in a train heading from Hohenzollern into Hapsburg territory i.e. from Germany into Hungary. News of a picture being stolen from the Louvre leads the Wine Merchant to tell the story of the mysterious disappearance of his fearsome aunt, Mrs Crispina Umberleigh, ‘born to legislate, codify, administrate, censor, license, ban, execute, and sit in judgement generally.’

‘As a nephew on a footing of only occasional visits she affected me merely as an epidemic, disagreeable while it lasted, but without any permanent effect.’

Her unexplained disappearance leaves a large hole in family life. After a while a ransom demand appears stating that the aunt has been kidnapped and is being held in Norway and will be returned unless a ransom payment of £2,000 is made, this, of course, being a comic inversion of the usual definition of a ransom which is where you pay to have someone returned. The uncle coughs up and this goes on for eight years.

Then one day the aunt reappears. Turns out she had never been kidnapped at all but suffered a complete loss of memory, wandered for a while and ended up working in domestic service in Birmingham. Then one day, eight years later, her memory returned and she came storming back into the lives of her astonished husband and family.

And the ransom demands? Had been made by an enterprising servant of the family :).

The Wolves of Cernogratz

All the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in that wailing cry.

A quietly moving and/or vitriolic story. Nouveau riche Baroness Gruebel and her husband have bought and live in the ancient castle somewhere in central Europe. She is telling her brother Conrad, a banker from Hamburg, about some of the romantic old stories attached to the castle, for example how the local wolves are supposed to start howling when anyone dies in the castle, when she is unexpectedly interrupted by the governess, Fraulein Schmidt, who reveals the real legend is that the wolves howl only when a member of the Cernogratz family is dying.

She then astonishes everyone by revealing that she is herself a member of the Cernogratz family. The family fell on hard times, was forced to sell the castle, she went into domestic service and ended up with the Gruebel family. It is a cruel irony which has brought her back here to the home of her ancestors.

That night, while the Baroness’s over-dressed, flashy rich guests are enjoying dinner, they are disturbed by the howling of wolves. They go to the governess’s bedroom and find the window flung open even though it is the depths of winter. The governess knows she is dying but wants to hear ‘the death-music of my family’.

Despite its society satire surface this is a strangely powerful story, like a fairytale. It is clearly linked to The Interlopers (see below) by being a) set in Eastern Europe b) featuring wolves c) being about authenticity and identity, contrasting the shallowness of human concerns with something deeper and more primeval.

Louis

Lena Strudwarden refuses to go abroad on holiday with her husband this year, insisting they go (yet again) to Brighton or Worthing. Her real reason is that their circle of acquaintances in Brighton and Worthing, though boring, show an admirable instinct to fawn on Mrs Strudwarden. In these sorts of arguments Lena always relies on excuses concerning her little dog, Louis, ‘the diminutive brown Pomeranian that lay, snug and irresponsive, beneath a shawl on her lap’, Louis couldn’t possibly go abroad, he couldn’t possibly be quarantined, he couldn’t survive without me, etc etc.

When Strudwarden complains to his sister, she, with unladylike brutality, suggests they just kill Louis. (The text acknowledges this fact: ‘“Novels have been written about women like you,” said Strudwarden; “you have a perfectly criminal mind.”)

So the next time Lena is out of the house, Strudwarden and her brother place the dog in a box and fix the only hole in it over the gas bracket. In other words, they set out to gas the dog to death. But in doing so they make an ironic discovery: Louis isn’t a real dog at all, he is a mechanical toy. All this time Lena has been using the little toy as an emotional lever to get her way with her husband.

The Guests

Annabel thinks the view from the room she’s sharing with her sister, Matilda, is English and pastoral but rather boring. Matilda has recently returned from India and tells her sister she loves boring, it’s a great relief from extravagant adventures abroad. Take the time when she was living in remote India and the Bishop of Bequar paid a surprise visit just as the river Gwadlipichee overflowed its banks, forcing the servants and all the livestock into the main house. It was chaos and socially embarrassing.

‘I’m afraid there is nowhere for you to sit,’ I said coldly; ‘the verandah is full of goats.’

The Penance

Octavian Ruttle thinks his neighbours’ cat is stealing his chickens, so he nerves himself to do away with it. Unfortunately, the neighbours’ three young children, lined up along the wall, witness the act, and in unison call him ‘Beast!’ They send, via servants, a sheet with BEAST childishly scrawled on it. This pricks Octavian’s already guilty conscience and he sets out to appease them by buying luxury chocolates, sends them next door, but later in the day finds them scornfully thrown back over the wall.

One day when Octavian is meant to be minding his two-year-old daughter, Olivia, the three children kidnap her. He sees them trundling her pushcart at top speed across a meadow and gives chase. He catches up just as they deposit the toddler into the muck of a massive pigsty and she starts sinking. Octavian can’t make it over to her in time and so begs the children to save her, he’ll do anything.

So they order him to do penance: to stand by the grave of their dead cat dressed only in a white sheet holding a candle and repeating: ‘I’m a miserable Beast’. Only when he actually does this, do the three children pin another piece of paper up with the message ‘Un-Beast.’

The Phantom Luncheon

Member of Parliament Sir James Drakmanton informs his wife that she must take for lunch the rather beastly Smithly-Dubbs whose family come in handy at election times. Exasperated at this tedious chore, Lady Drakmanton decides to pull a practical joke. She contacts the three Smithly-Dubbs ladies to invite them for lunch, then does her hair in an unusual style and dresses in not her usual manner before going to meet them in their hotel foyer and whisking them off to the Carlton where she encourages them to choose all the most expensive dishes on the menu.

Then she drops a bombshell by claiming not to be Lady Drakmanton at all, but another woman altogether who keeps having fits of memory loss, then it comes to her: she is in fact Ellen Niggle, of the Ladies’ Brasspolishing Guild.

At that precise moment (as she had arranged) another woman enters the Carlton dining room who looks and is dressed exactly like Lady Drakmanton, who she points out to the three appalled young women as the real Lady Drakmanton, thus confirming her story.

And before they can recover their composure, Lady D thanks them for a lovely meal and sweeps out, leaving the discombobulated Smithly-Dubbs to pay the (very large) bill.

A Bread and Butter Miss

A story about horse-racing. The guests at a country-house party are eagerly discussing the upcoming Derby when it is discovered that one of them, young Lola, has dreams which come true and last night dreamed of a horse race and dreamed that the crowd cheered when ‘Bread and Butter’ wins.

There is no horse named Bread and Butter in this year’s Derby so a furious debate ensues about which actual horse she could be referring to. They desperately want her to fall asleep and dream a bit of clarification but, it turns out, with comic frustration, when she’s not dreaming dreams which come true, Lola has bad insomnia and, sure enough, despite the comical welter of suggestions to help her get off to sleep, she passes a sleepless night and morning.

Next day, as the race is underway, she lets slip one more vital detail in her dream which helps the guests guess correctly the name of the winning horse which does, indeed, win, but by then it is too late for any of them to place a bet.

Bertie’s Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in the household of Luke Steffink, Esq. complete with posh guests. When a couple frivolously recall the Eastern tradition that on Christmas Eve, animals in their stalls can talk, the guests all troop down to the cow house to see if it’s true.

However, Luke’s disgruntled nephew (‘Bertie Steffink had early in life adopted the profession of ne’er-do-well’) is angry at everyone because the family has decided it is going to pack him off to Africa in an effort to find him gainful employment. So, out of spite, Bertie locks them all in the cow house, and invites some passing revellers into Luke’s house to drink all his champagne and raucously sing out of tune Christmas carols. It’s a kind of sketch or scene rather than an actual story.

For someone interested in social history, the most interesting part comes at the beginning where Bertie’s loser status is established by describing the family’s attempts to set him up with jobs in various colonies, a passage which vividly conveys the way the Commonwealth and Empire were conceived as a sort of dumping ground for the useless upper-middle-classes.

At the age of eighteen Bertie had commenced that round of visits to our Colonial possessions, so seemly and desirable in the case of a Prince of the Blood, so suggestive of insincerity in a young man of the middle-class. He had gone to grow tea in Ceylon and fruit in British Columbia, and to help sheep to grow wool in Australia. At the age of twenty he had just returned from some similar errand in Canada, from which it may be gathered that the trial he gave to these various experiments was of the summary drum-head nature. Luke Steffink, who fulfilled the troubled role of guardian and deputy-parent to Bertie, deplored the persistent manifestation of the homing instinct on his nephew’s part, and his solemn thanks earlier in the day for the blessing of reporting a united family had no reference to Bertie’s return. Arrangements had been promptly made for packing the youth off to a distant corner of Rhodesia, whence return would be a difficult matter…

Forewarned

Alethia Debchance has spent her entire 28 years at the remote rural house of her aunt near Webblehinton. She is as naive and unworldly as it is possible to be. Thus when she goes to visit a distant relation, Robert Bludward, who is standing for election, she is astonished at the extreme criticism directed at him by two gentlemen she overhears in a train and by an article she reads in the paper. She makes up her mind to tell his opponent, Sir John Chobham. But as she sets out to do so, she hears the same kinds of comments made, and reads an equally damning article, about him, too.

Bewildered and appalled at the terrible men abroad in the world, she retreats back to her aunt’s rural hideaway and immerses herself in the breathless women’s novels that she consumes like smarties.

It is both a satire on a certain kind of unworldly English spinster, but also on the casually vituperative discourse surrounding English politics, a subject Saki was an expert on after years of being a parliamentary correspondent for the newspapers.

The Interlopers

Somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a patch of forest land has been disputed between three successive generations of two families of neighbouring landowners. The current rivals are Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym.

One day they both happen to be out with parties of their own men, wander away from them, and encounter each other in the depths of the forest. As they go to raise their rifles to shoot each other there is a loud crack and half a beech tree plummets down, pinning them both helplessly to the ground.

Over the next hour or so, as they come to acknowledge their plight, both injured and cold and pinned by the fallen tree to the ground with various broken bones, they slowly come to reassess the stupid rivalry which has dominated their lives. Eventually Ulrich offers his wine flask to Znaeym which the other grudgingly accepts and they decide to put the feud behind them and become friends. They agree to shout for help from their respective men, but the calling only attracts… a pack of wolves!

A gruesome parable about…what? The stupid pettiness of human concerns, petty rivalries and feuds which don’t, placed in the larger perspective of the human condition, matter a damn. Or the vanity of human presumption, showing that both men’s claims to ‘own’ the woods are ridiculous. The true owners of the forest are the wolves; both humans are merely the ‘interlopers’ of the title.

Quail Seed

Mr Scarrick rents out the rooms over his suburban grocery store to an artist and his sister. He complains that business has fallen off woefully because shoppers are attracted by the sales gimmicks of big stores in town, which include music played on gramophones and tickertape news about sports.

So the artist comes up with the idea of staging what would nowadays be called performance art, namely he, his sister and a local boy they hire will play the parts of strange and exotic figures, mysterious strangers who seem to be leaving codes messages for each other, about grand plans and feverish rivalries. Intrigue and gossip. Maybe spies!

It works a treat. Word spreads and soon Mr Scarrick’s shop is full of local housewives waiting to witness the next bizarre episode in the fictional drama.

Canossa

A nonsensical satire on the trivial silliness of political life, indicated by the initial setup which is that Demosthenes Platterbaff, the eminent Unrest Inducer, is on trial for blowing up the Albert Hall on the eve of the great Liberal Federation Tango Tea, the occasion on which the Chancellor of the Exchequer was expected to propound his new theory: ‘Do partridges spread infectious diseases?’

The point is that there is a by-election set for the constituency of Nemesis-on-Hand the day after the jury are scheduled to deliver their verdict and the view is that a guilty verdict will lead to the government losing the seat in a protest vote by working men supporters of Platterbaff. Therefore the story is about the contortions the government ties itself up in, in order to find him guilty but not let him go to gaol.

More precisely, he is allowed to go to gaol for precisely one night after the guilty verdict is brought in but then (the Prime Minister and Home Secretary feverishly decide) will be released early enough the next morning for his release to be telegraphed to the by-election constituency and broadcast to his supporters who will then, hopefully, support the government.

This already ridiculous story turns into farce when Platterbaff announces that he will not physically leave the prison unless there’s a brass band to play him out. He always has a brass band.

We are then witness to the comic panic of the Prime Minister and senior cabinet members as they try to arrange this at very short notice, hampered by the fact that there is a musicians’ strike on (strikes were a surprisingly ubiquitous element of Edwardian life which Saki is here satirising).

In the farcical climax of the story, the Prime Minister and colleagues are forced to borrow knackered old instruments from the prison recreation room and themselves batter out an out-of-tune rendering of the pop hit of the moment ‘I didn’t want to do it’ (which, incidentally, dates this story to the second half of 1913).

And the comic punchline of the entire story? The government loses the by-election anyway, because the trade unions ordered their members to vote against the cabinet for acting as strike-breakers (for playing musical instruments during a musicians’ strike).

So it is a satire on the extreme contortions to which modern politicians are forced to go in the name of democracy, of bending over backwards to accommodate even terrorists in order to win their supporters’ votes, but how even the most humiliating obeisance won’t be enough to satisfy the sky-high demands of the new militant working class electorate.

As to the title, Canossa is the site where the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV did penance in 1077, standing three days bare-headed in the snow, in order to reverse his excommunication by Pope Gregory VII. It’s the kind of factual element which would benefit from a note of explanation.

The Threat

One of Saki’s anti-suffragette satires. Sir Lulworth Quayne (a recurring character in these stories), sat in the lounge of his favourite restaurant, the Gallus Bankiva, describes to his nephew, recently returned from abroad, an evermore absurd list of (fictional) strategies adopted by the suffragettes (for example, enlivening the state opening of Parliament by releasing thousands of parrots, which had been carefully trained to scream ‘Votes for women’).

The joke in the story is that the leading suffragettes come up with a plan which outdoes all the others, converting their hitherto negative strategies into a positive one. They threaten to erect exact replicas of the Victoria Memorial at key locations all around the capital. ‘No, no, anything but that!’ The government gives in to their demands.

Excepting Mrs. Pentherby

Reggie Bruttle has inherited a big but not particularly practical mansion named ‘The Limes’. He has the brainwave of converting it into the venue for a kind of continuous, rolling country-house party. However, Major Dagworth points out that the womenfolk will give trouble, within days they’ll be bitching and arguing.

On the whole, the major is proven wrong, except for Mrs Pentherby. Within days all the other women have come to loathe her casual condescension and come to Reggie with their complaints.

Reggie listened with the attenuated regret that one bestows on an earthquake disaster in Bolivia or a crop failure in Eastern Turkestan.

But then the comic reveal: It turns out Reggie has invited Mrs Pentherby precisely to be the official quarreler, to act as a lightning rod, attracting to herself all the bitching energy of the other women, in order to unify the others in their dislike and make them pleasant to everyone else. Cue feminist outrage.

Mark

Augustus Mellowkent is an up-and-coming novelist. His agent suggests he changes his name to ‘Mark’ which sounds more manly.

But the story itself concerns the visit, one morning in December, of a tiresome encyclopedia salesman, one Caiaphas Dwelf. At first Mark puts up with Dwelf’s tiresome sales pitch, but then has a brainwave. He takes down one of his own novels and starts reading an excerpt to the salesman, telling him what an excellent resource a Mark Mellowkent novel is if one is trapped at a boring country-house party. The salesman replies with a dithyramb on the useful geographical knowledge contained in his encyclopedia. Mark replies with the opening of his classic work, The Cageless Linnet and so it goes on, a duel of bores.

Eventually the salesman is forced to abandon his spiel, closes his sample volume and leaves Mark’s house, and ‘a look of respectful hatred flickered in the cold grey eyes.’

The Hedgehog

Every year a mixed doubles tennis match is held at the rectory garden party hosted by Mrs Norbury and every year a quartet of old ladies sit in judgement on the players, not least the bitchy Mrs. Dole and Mrs. Hatch-Mallard. They argue and contradict each other about everything.

When it is announced that a young lady, Ada Bleek, who happens to be a clairvoyante, is coming down to the house party, they even argue about whose ghost she will see, Mrs Dole insisting she will see the ghost of Lady Cullompton, murdered by one of her ancestors, Mrs Hatch-Mallard insisting she will see the ghost of her uncle, who committed suicide in the house in the most tragical of circumstances.

In the event Miss Bleek does see a ghost but not one belonging to either of the rivals, instead a giant white hedgehog which slithers across her bedroom floor! Social satire gives way to the genuinely weird.

The Mappined Life

The Mappin Terraces at London Zoo were opened in 1914, so they were very recent when Saki made them the subject of a story. Mrs. James Gurtleberry and her niece start off by discussing whether the animals penned in this slightly larger caged area have any illusory sense of freedom. But the story evolves into an impassioned and deeply depressing diatribe from the niece about how we are, all of us, trapped in the Mappin Terraces of our own narrow, blinkered and utterly unfree little lives.

Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of liberty…

Surprisingly serious and surprisingly pessimistic.

Fate (Clovis Sangrail)

Rex Dillot is nearly twenty-four and almost continually penniless. He scrapes a living by betting shrewdly on the little sporting competitions at the country-house parties he frequents, but he is ambitious to make one really big killing wager.

His opportunity comes when cadaverous old Major Latton is scheduled to spend an evening playing billiards against cocky young Mr. Strinnit. Dillot bets more than he actually has on the major to win but the game goes against expectations and Strinnit is advancing his score in leaps and bounds.

Too distraught to watch the climax of the game and his own ruination, Dillon wanders off upstairs to the guest bedrooms. Here he overhears the snores of Mrs Thundleford who had retired to her room in a huff when all the other houseguests declared themselves more interested in watching two men knock about ivory balls than listen to her simply fascinating slideshow and lecture about the architecture of Venice.

Dillot opens her bedroom door. Sure enough Mrs. Thundleford has nodded off sitting very close to the reading lamp. If only a kind fate had had her nudge or knock it over, thus starting a fire, thus causing an outcry, thus interrupting the game, thus saving Dillon from ruinous losses. Well… sometimes one has to make one’s own fate…

And thus it is that a few moments later Dillot comes thundering into the games room carrying a startled Mrs. Thundleford whose dress is (slightly) on fire, dumps her on the billiard table and announces the house is on fire, leading to screams and shouts and the dousing of the flames with soda water and rugs and cushions. And the game? Oh called off, of course. Oh dear, what a shame!

But then, as Clovis remarked, when one is rushing about with a blazing woman in one’s arms one can’t stop to think out exactly where one is going to put her.

The Bull

Tom Yorkfield is a small farmer with a small herd of cows serviced by his pride and joy, a bull named Clover Fairy. The bull is probably worth £80 though Tom tells himself he’d hold out for at least £100.

Tom has never gotten on with his half-brother, Laurence. When the latter pays a visit he is tactless enough to be a) underwhelmed when Tom takes him to see his pride and joy, b) and then to boast about a painting of a bull which he recently sold for £400. And, he assures his angry brother, will continue to climb in value while Clover Fairy slowly loses all value till she’s sold for the price of his pelt and hooves.

Tom snaps, loses his temper, makes to hit Laurence who backs then runs away, and all this commotion excites the bull who promptly tosses Laurence then goes to trample him. Luckily Tom pulls him off and spends the next few weeks tending him back to health among many apologies.

A recovered Laurence duly returns to work as an artist and grows in popularity of a painter of animals ‘but his subjects are always kittens or fawns or lambkins—never bulls’.

Morlvera

Two impoverished cockney kids, Emmeline, aged ten, and Bert, aged seven, stop in front of a posh toy emporium and are attracted by an overdressed doll (an ’embodiment of overdressed depravity’) which they immediately start attributing all kinds of bloodthirsty crimes to. The children’s malevolent imaginations and cockney accents are very enjoyable.

Then along comes a chauffeur-driven car out of which emerge spoiled little Victor in his sailor suit and his commanding mother. Our two backstreet kids overhear their conversation. The mother is nagging Victor that they need to buy something for his friend, Bertha, as she bought him a beautiful box of soldiers on his birthday.

Once inside the shop, with infinite reluctance Victor allows himself to be persuaded by the sales assistant into selecting the malevolent-looking doll Emmeline and Bert had been surveying. The cockney kids watch as Victor emerges clutching the thing, gets into his car with his mother, and very carefully throws the doll out the back window just as the vehicle is reversing. The car’s back wheel gently crushes the doll to smithereens. Emmeline and Bert are thrilled and delighted.

A delicious story about children’s utter lack of innocence, their wild violent imaginations, but which also captures the class divisions of Saki’s day.

Shock Tactics (Clovis Sangrail)

‘People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime or a broken night’s rest, than ever they would to a broken heart.’

A Clovis story. The mother of Clovis’s friend Bertie, 19 years old, insists on opening all his letters and reading them, much to his chagrin. Clovis conceives a hilarious prank. He gets delivered to Bertie’s house a series of letters in which he poses as an utterly fictitious young lady named Clotilde and hints that she and Bertie are involved in unspeakable goings-on which involve the suicide of a serving girl and some jewels.

Astounded and enraged, Bertie’s mother rushes upstairs, banging on Bertie’s (locked) bedroom door and insisting he explain each of the successively more scandalous revelations until… a final letter arrives from Clovis explaining that, since Bertie told him that someone nosy in the household was opening his letters, Clovis has conceived the idea of sending deliberately fake letters in order to sniff the shameful culprit out.

Bertie’s mother is mortified and humiliated and from that moment onwards never opens another of Bertie’s letter.

The Seven Cream Jugs

Anything that was smaller and more portable than a sideboard, and above the value of ninepence, had an irresistible attraction for him, provided that it fulfilled the necessary condition of belonging to someone else.

Mr and Mrs Peter Pigeoncote are paid a visit by their relative Wilfred. Wilfred is a common name in their extended family and so they imagine this Wilfred is the one known widely in the family as ‘Wilfred the Snatcher’ because he is a kleptomaniac.

This stresses the couple because it just so happens to be the date of their silver wedding anniversary and friends and family far and near have bombarded them with silver gifts. Reluctantly, they show ‘Wilfred the Snatcher’ their gifts, including no fewer than seven silver cream jugs.

Wilfred is polite and complimentary, then it is time for bed. After he’s gone upstairs, Mrs and Mrs count up all the silver presents and become convinced that one of the cream jugs is missing and convinced that Wilfred must have stolen it. Next morning when he’s in the bathroom, they sneak into his bedroom and rifle through his suitcase and find… the missing silver cream jug! They take it back but decide to say nothing about it.

Half an hour later, when he comes down for breakfast, Wilfred immediately announces that one of the servants must be a thief because someone has stolen the silver cream jug from his suitcase. He goes on to explain that he and his mother had carefully selected the silver jug as a silver wedding anniversary for the pair but he forgot to give it earlier in the evening and when the couple showed him the presents they’d received to date and laughed at the fact that they’d already received seven cream jugs, he felt too embarrassed to proceed.

During this explanation several facts tumbled out which made the horrified couple realise that this Wilfred Pigeoncote is not the famous Wilfred the Snatcher but a much more remote relative, a Wilfred who is very high up in the Foreign Office! My God! They’ve made a disastrous mistake! Mrs Pigeoncote feels faint and dispatches husband Peter to fetch her smelling salts.

The situation is retrieved when, while her husband is out of the room, Mrs P confides in a low tone that the culprit is none other than her husband! ‘My God,’ says Wilfred the Foreign Office; ‘What, you mean like Wilfred the Snatcher!? My God, it must run in the family.’ ‘Yes,’ says the wife, ‘It is most tragic,’ handing him back the stolen cream jug, ‘and we’d be most grateful if you could keep it to yourself!’

The Occasional Garden

Elinor Rapsley is moaning that her back garden is too big to be ignored but not big enough to make a statement and she’s stressed because Gwenda Pottingdon has invited herself to lunch, and is ‘only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden.’

The Baroness (a recurring character we’ve met in previous stories) advises her to subscribe to the OOSA, the Occasional-Oasis Supply Association. If you’re having a social event and have a scrappy back space, the OOSA will supply the garden of your dreams for the day, and tailor it to your guests, as well. Or you can pay extra and get the EON or Envy of the Neighbourhood service.

So Elinor pays for a de luxe garden to be installed ahead of Gwenda Pottingdon’s lunch visit and the latter is suitably overawed and silenced. Unfortunately, a few days later, when the OOSA has been back to remove the temporarily hired garden, Gwenda Pottingdon pays a surprise visit, barges her way into the living room and is immediately startled to see the previously luxurious garden completely absent. What happened?

‘Suffragettes,’ is Elinor’s brilliant, one-word reply, the one-word explanation for any kind of vandalism and hooliganism.

The Sheep

The Sheep is in fact the nickname of a very bad bridge player: ‘Being awfully and uselessly sorry formed a large part of his occupation in life.’ His bridge partner and prospective brother-in-law, Richard, thinks of him as one of the world’s many sheep, bumbling foolishly through life while all the time imagining himself a big, brave fellah. What makes it so galling is that, having lost his son, Robbie, fighting in India, Richard has no heir so, when the Sheep marries his sister, Kathleen, it’ll be only a matter of time before the inept bumbler inherits the family home and raises more ‘sheep’.

When the Sheep and Richard are on the way back from a day’s shooting during which he has pitifully failed to bag anything, the Sheep is suddenly confronted by a large bird lifting off the ground and flying slowly towards them and hits it with both barrels. Unfortunately, it is a very rare honey-buzzard which Richard’s family have been going to great lengths to protect for the last four years.

The local MP has died and Richard throws himself into a round of canvassing for votes which leads up to a packed meeting to be addressed by their candidate the night before the vote. Richard is due to give thanks to the Chairman but has a sore throat and (foolishly) asks the Sheep to do it. He makes the required customary sentence or two but then decides to give the meeting the benefit of his own opinions which turn out to be wildly destructive and unpopular. His remarks travel all round the constituency and lose the election.

Then Richard and Kathleen and the Sheep go for a winter holiday in the Alps. The Sheep insists on going too near to the thin ice on the lake which all the skaters have been amply warned against. No surprise when there’s a cry and he disappears into an ice hole. Richard immediately skates to the land where he’d seen a ladder which can be used to reach across the dodgy ice to save him. But as he reaches for it a huge guard dog leaps on him and keeps him pinned down during the vital moments when the Sheep might have been rescued, but in fact drowns.

As a result, Richard buys the guard dog and it becomes his loyal and much-loved companion :).

The Oversight (Clovis Sangrail)

Lady Prowche goes to enormous lengths to ensure that the guests to her prospective country-house party cannot possibly disagree about anything (after a run of parties which each ended in appalling rows). With her friend Lena Luddleford she goes carefully through a list of the many issues which divided Edwardian society, eliminating anyone who would be liable to fall out about any of them, and eventually whittles her list down to the only two possible men she can invite.

But first she tasks Lena with the all-important job of ascertaining the two men’s views align on the hot topic of the day, vivisection. A day or two later back comes the signal that they do agree on this issue and so Lady Prowche goes ahead and invites them.

With lamentable consequences. Despite all her efforts the two men do, in fact, fall out, and the party ends in a big row. Why? Because they support opposite sides in the recent Balkan Wars: ‘One of them was Pro-Greek and the other Pro-Bulgar.’ Damn! So close!

Hyacinth

Hyacinth is the name of an intelligently malicious boy. He is the son of Matilda who insists on taking him along for the election campaign of her husband who is up against the newly appointed Colonial Secretary (who has also brought his three little children along for the campaign) much against the advice of her good friend Mrs. Panstreppon who knows just what Hyacinth is like.

After the polls have closed, Hyacinth phones his mother to explain that he has kidnapped the three charming little children and locked them in a local pigsty with a very angry huge sow locked outside. If their father wins the poll, he will unlock the door and the big angry sow will devour the children. If his (Hyacinth’s) father wins, he’ll let the children go.

This results in the kids’ father, Jutterly the Colonial Secretary, rushing round to the town hall begging them to query and invalidate as many of his votes as possible in order to save his children’s lives. It works. He manages to lose, his defeat is communicated to Hyacinth, who lets down a ladder into the stye which allows the three terrified toddlers to climb to safety.

‘Told you so’, says Mrs. Panstreppon. Hyacinth wouldn’t be out of place in a modern Mexican election, she points out drolly; but maybe leave him at home for the next domestic one.

This story contains both animals and children, vectors of Saki’s satire on the absurd pretensions of the adult world, continual revealers of the spite and violence at the heart of nature.

The Purple of the Balkan Kings

The first of two ‘stories’ about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

Luitpold Wolkenstein, financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale, sat in his favoured cafe in the world-wise Habsburg capital, confronted with the Neue Freie Presse and the cup of cream-topped coffee and attendant glass of water that a sleek-headed piccolo had just brought him.

Austrian cafe expert, podgy inexperienced and smug, Wolkenstein is horrified at news of the Balkan War which heralds the rise of new nations on his border, new nations who’ll want to teach the old Great Powers a thing or two! The Ottoman Empire has lost almost all its possessions in Europe, while a significantly enlarged Serbia has begun agitating for a union of all the Slavs in south-east Europe.

As you can see, this is more of a character profile heavy with political interpretation i.e. condemnation of Austria’s smug bourgeoisie, than a ‘story’.

The Cupboard of the Yesterdays

The second of two ‘stories’ about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 is a dialogue between the abstract figures of the Wanderer and the Merchant.

The Merchant holds the conventional liberal view that the Balkan Wars are a tragedy, all that death and waste etc. Whereas the Wanderer holds a completely different view: he thinks the tragedy is that, with the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe and the establishment of modern nation-states with clearly defined borders, a lot of the old glamour and mystique of the murky Balkans will disappear.

‘The old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.’

He uses words like magic and charm:

‘It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea—nothing that I ever learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on me as that strange-named inland sea, and I don’t think its magic has ever faded out of my imagination…’
‘There is a charm about those countries that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm of uncertainty and landslide…’

But now that many of these nations have gained nationhood, in fifteen years the whole region will be about as glamorous as Bexhill! As the Wanderer himself admits, his version of the Balkans exists primarily to ‘to thrill and enliven’ our humdrum existences, to fire our slothful imaginations.

So it’s not really a story at all, it’s more the exposition of a worldview, the late-Victorian worldview which found glamour and excitement in tales of derring-do in far-off, exotic places. In this respect, it’s not unlike the opening passage of Bertie’s Christmas which gave the impression that the entire British Empire and Commonwealth existed solely for the entertainment and gainful employment of the English upper middle-classes. Maybe it did.

For the Duration of the War

The Reverend Wilfrid Gaspilton finds himself removed from the fashionable parish of St. Luke’s Kensingate to the immoderately rural parish of St. Chuddocks, somewhere in Yondershire. His wife finds it dire and buries herself in translating an obscure French novel.

Wilfrid also finds it unbearably boring until he has an idea: to concoct a literary hoax. He makes up:

Ghurab, a hunter, or, according to other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who lived, in some unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of Karmanshah

and attributes to him fragments of poetry allegedly discovered by the Reverend’s own son, currently serving in Mesopotamia.

The reverend then sends these fictional fragments of Persian poetry to the Bi-Monthly Review in London which publishes them and they quickly become popular, taken up and quoted, and a Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club is founded whose members refer to each other as Brother Ghurabians.

War brings many unintended consequences.

Themes

The role of animals in Saki’s short stories

The previous collection of short stories, Beasts and Super-Beasts, was aptly titled, since rogue animals play a key role in many of them, the more bizarre or encountered in bizarre circumstances, the more savage and violent, the better.

Like the werewolf in Gabriel-Ernest or the hyena which eats a gypsy child in Esmé or the polecat which kills Conradin’s aunt in Sredni Vishtar. Violent, beast-related and gruesome, it’s no accident that those three stories are among Saki’s most celebrated.

In this collection, there are some exotic beasts, but not so many:

The Wolves of Cernogratz
Louis centres on a mechanical lapdog
The Guests describes an overflow of goats and a leopard! during a flood in India
The Penance involves a domestic cat and a big pig
The Mappined Life contrasts the lives of zoo animals with humans
Bertie’s Christmas Eve involves farmyard cows
The Interlopers features the forest wolves at the end
The Hedgehog in which a young woman has a vision of a giant white hedgehog
The Bull is about a prize bull which tosses and tramples the artist
Hyacinth which features a potentially murderous sow

It is no accident that the two most haunting stories in the set, The Interlopers and The Wolves of Cernogratz, both feature animals at their most intense and symbolic, symbolic counterpoints to the superficialities of human wealth and culture.

The other stories mostly feature domestic or pretty plain farm animals (cat, cows, pig) in relatively humdrum settings but nonetheless, The Animal plays a role in Saki’s fiction as a kind of wild card, thrown into otherwise banal social settings to create an element which punctures the polite pretensions of human society and its timid conventions (satirised in the story about afternoon tea).

The role of ‘abroad’

Another thing about the two wolf stories is that they are not set in England.

It is a critical platitude about Saki that his stories mock the Edwardian English upper classes and, indeed, many of them are set in London drawing rooms or at country-house parties. But it’s arguable that the best of them (obviously the two wolf stories, but also the two at the end ‘about’ the Balkan wars, or the three animal stories from earlier collections) do not.

There is a consistent strand of Saki stories which are not set in England at all, and he has a penchant for Eastern Europe or Russia where he himself spent some years as a correspondent. The appeal of these, at the time, fairly remote destinations is made explicit in The Cupboards of Yesterday: they are remote and untamed, full of casual violence and risk which thrills the bourgeois imagination in a way life in Bexhill emphatically can’t.

The notion that animals speak on Christmas Eve in Bertie’s Christmas Eve derives from Russia, precisely the kind of peasant superstition you’d expect from what the Edwardian readers thought of as a charmingly backward peasant society.

The tension between the two – tame England and exotic abroad – comes out a little in the story Louis, where Mr Strudwarden wants to holiday in (exotic) Vienna while his wife insists on going, yet again, to Brighton, precisely because that is where she will find the dull, unimaginative people who find her interesting.

In this respect ‘abroad’ provides another dichotomy or pole against which to set ‘the normal’ existence of the Edwardian middle classes, to bring it into more vivid focus and to critique it, just as ‘animals’ do, and…

Children

…just as children do. In Saki’s world children are emphatically not the innocent angels of conventional thinking. For me the funniest story is Morlvera with its brilliantly funny depiction of the two backstreet London kids, their heads full of lurid, bloodthirsty imagining, but there are also:

the two boys in Toys of Peace who can turn even the blandest present into a vehicle for violence and blood
the three children in Penance who are prepared to let Octavian Ruttle’s 2-year-old daughter drown in pig poo
the ghastly Hyacinth, prepared to let other children be eaten alive

So animals, abroad, and children, are all perspectives or devices which Saki uses to highlight and mock the shallow, silly world of his contemporary society.

Not limited to Edwardian upper classes but told in an upper class tone of voice

Saki’s stories are not really set among the upper classes. I’ve just read Bull, which is about a farmer and his struggling artist brother. Not set in London and very much not among aristocrats. Or take Quail Seed, which concerns a shopkeeper and an impecunious artist he’s rented rooms to in some suburb or small town.

Maybe I’m making the simple point that Saki’s stories are more varied, in setting, class, character and subject matter, than is ordinarily accepted.

At which point, I realised a fairly obvious truth. The characters, settings and subject matter of the stories may not be narrowly upper class – but the tone is. The tone of the narrator, and the character it implies in pretty much all of the stories, is that of the exaggeratedly playful, carelessly privileged, upper class idler, a tone of calculated indifference, sophisticated insouciance, a lofty, mocking detachment from anything serious.

This tone is embodied from time to time in the recurring figure of the useless son or nephew who is failing to get a job or a career or a focus in life, such as Bertie Steffink (Bertie’s Last Christmas) or the useless young Bertie Heasant in Shock Tactics.

And from time to time crystallises in the character of the youthful, playful, witty prankster and bon mot artist, Clovis Sangrail (although Clovis appears in only four of these 31 stories). Clovis has the same playfully amoral wittiness of Oscar Wilde’s protagonists, and many of the snappy one-liners to match:

Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted with imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime; Clovis Sangrail irreverently declared that she had caught a chill at the Coronation of Queen Victoria and had never let it go again.
‘When you wear a look of tragic gloom in a swimming-bath,’ said Clovis, ‘it’s especially noticeable from the fact that you’re wearing very little else.’
But then, as Clovis remarked, when one is rushing about with a blazing woman in one’s arms one can’t stop to think out exactly where one is going to put her.

So it’s not Clovis himself who predominates, it’s his tone, the tone of amused, ironic malice which pervades the stories at every level, no matter where their setting or what their subject matter:

As long as the garden produced asparagus and carnations at pleasingly frequent intervals Mrs. Gaspilton was content to approve of its expense and otherwise ignore its existence. She would fold herself up, so to speak, in an elegant, indolent little world of her own, enjoying the minor recreations of being gently rude to the doctor’s wife and continuing the leisurely production of her one literary effort, The Forbidden Horsepond.

‘Being gently rude to the doctor’s wife’. An understated tone which glosses over ironical comparisons and unexpected juxtapositions which are always amusing and sometimes very funny.

The Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a modern Wesleyan Conference… With the inhabitants of his parish he was no better off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the ailments were almost invariably rheumatism. Some, of course, had other bodily infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well. The Rector had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life, not to have rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have been presented at Court would be in more ambitious circles.

Political stories

The Edwardian period was one of surprising political stresses and crises and a number of the stories directly invoke the world of politics. Except that, true to form, what interests Saki is not the issues themselves but the way the issues, and the political process itself, can be mocked and ridiculed. To my daughter the feminist, the suffragettes are the subject of burning zeal. To Saki, they are the punchline of a joke.

It may be worth listing the stories which contain at least some politics:

The Disappearance: in the world of politics Edward Umberleigh is considered a strong man
The Phantom Lunch: MP Sir James Drakmanton insists that his wife lunches with the ghastly Smithly-Dubbs women because they and their uncle help him at election time
Forewarned is entirely about how the standard level of abuse and vitriol thrown about in a local election strikes an utterly innocent outsider
Canossa is a satire on Parliamentary politics
The Threat is an anti-suffragette satire pitched at the highest level where upper class suffragettes hobnob with the Prime Minister, leading up to the passage of an Act of Parliament
Hyacinth is another satire on the ridiculousness of local elections
The Sheep the final part of which is about the nuts and bolts of canvassing for a local election
Hyacinth is about a local Parliamentary election

The political stories confirm the impression derived from reading his polemical, alarmist novel, When William Came, that after 15 years as a political correspondent Saki was heartily sickened and disillusioned by British politics. Who isn’t? His disillusion comes from a solidly patrician, right-wing perspective. But his withering satire on the business of politics is just as destructive.

Suffragettes

Saki was clearly against the suffragettes who he associates with unreasonable demands and violent, vandalistic behaviour. Sometimes he mounts a direct attack, as in The Threat, which features a suffragette who comes up with a cunning new strategy. Other times it is a throwaway remark which, in its own way, is more revealing of the way the suffragettes were regarded by some in Edwardian England.

Thus when, in the comic story, The Occasional Garden, Gwenda Pottingdon pops in unexpectedly on her ‘friend’ Elinor Rapsley and is startled to discover that the sumptuous back garden she had displayed just four days earlier has vanished, Elinor has the presence of mind to explain with one word: Suffragettes, which says enough, and the way it says enough speaks volumes about its place in the respectable, middle-class discourse of the day.

In Louis the brother and sister conspiring to kill Lena’s insufferable dog for a moment consider making up a story that suffragettes had invaded the house and killed it by throwing a brick at it. No act of wanton violence was too outrageous not to be assigned to the violent suffragettes.

And in The Oversight one example of many guests who’ve got into frightful rows is Laura Henniseed, by implication one of the votes for women women. As remarks: ‘Of course the Suffragette question is a burning one, and lets loose the most dreadful ill-feeling.’ Maybe it was as divisive as Brexit has been in our own day.

Real alienation

The least humorous of the stories is the most bitter and may be, in some sense, the most psychologically ‘true’. In The Mappined Life, after they’ve visited London Zoo’s pathetic attempt to give its caged, constricted animals the illusion of wildness and freedom by building a pathetic little concrete area named the Mappin Gardens, her niece reduces Aunt Gurtleberry to tears by saying that they, too, are cabin’d, cribb’d and confined into narrow little lives of utter predictability and emptiness.

Its tone borders on suicidal despair and (this is pure speculation) makes you wonder whether, after fifteen years of chronicling the political scene and upper class life in Edwardian England, Saki, like so many others, welcomed the Great War as a chance to cleanse and redeem themselves from the sordid littleness and petty compromises of English life.

An annotated Saki

Probably the expense would never be justified, but it would be lovely to have an annotated edition of Saki’s stories because some of them contain a veritable blizzard of what are obviously references to contemporary events which it would be entertaining and informative to have properly explained.

For example, The Oversight is a story all about the subjects people find to argue about at country-house parties: religion (Church of England or non-conformist), politics (for or against Lloyd George), votes for women (for or against), vivisection, the Derby decision (‘the Stewards’ decision about Craganour’), the Falconer Report (into the Marconi scandal), and taking sides during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913.

I was able to look up Mappin Terraces at London Zoo, which were brand new when Saki wrote his story about them, but there are many more fleeting references to contemporary people or events which flash by with the mention of just a name or fleeting reference which you know is important but cannot identify. When, in The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh, he casually refers to ‘the feminine cycling craze’ it would be nice to learn more.

And it is a minor but interesting note that the troubled situation in Mexico (then experiencing the start of its long drawn-out revolution) is referred to in no fewer than three stories (The Threat, The Mappined Life and Hyacinth) so was obviously having an impact on educated opinion, but what impact, exactly?

Ignoring this steady stream of contemporary issues has the net effect of making Saki’s stories seem more timeless and ahistorical than they actually are. It’s true that half or more of the stories are set in the timeless world of upper-middle-class twits which to some extent anticipates P.G. Wodehouse’s. But even these sometimes contain sharp references to very recent, headline-making political and social events, which indicate the depth of Saki’s engagement and commitment.

Comic similes

He brought her a large yellow dahlia, which she grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a stare of benevolent boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur classical dancing performed in aid of a deserving charity.

[The Salvation Army] used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions.

Saki’s works

Reginald (1904)
Reginald in Russia, and other sketches (1910)
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
The Unbearable Bassington (novel) (1912)
When William Came (novel) (1913)
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
The Toys of Peace (1919)
The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924)

Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948)

“How you cling to your purity, young man! How afraid you are to soil your hands! All right, stay pure! What good will it do? Why did you join us? Purity is an idea for a yogi or a monk. You intellectuals and bourgeois anarchists use it as a pretext for doing nothing. To do nothing, to remain motionless, arms at your sides, wearing kid gloves. Well, I have dirty hands. Right up to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in filth and blood. But what do you hope? Do you think you can govern innocently?”
(Communist Party boss, Hoederer, in Act V of Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre)

This is by far the longest of the four plays in the Vintage collection of Sartre’s plays – Huis Clos is one continuous act of forty pages, The Respectful Prostitute is even shorter at 30 pages – whereas Les Mains Sales has seven acts and is 120 pages long! And I think it’s also the most enjoyable because the characters have time to breathe and expand and become believable.

The plot

Act I

It is 1944 in the fictional East European country of Illyria and the Russian Army is coming closer. Olga is in a flat used by the Illyrian communist party. Hugo arrives. He has just been released from prison. He is young, handsome, talkative. He has just served two years for the murder of the communist leader, Hoederer. A knock at the door and he hides. Olga opens the door to representatives of the Party, tough guys with guns. They’ve come to kill Hugo, they’ve trailed him here, he’s a liability, a loose cannon, he must be liquidated. Olga pleads for his life and says, ‘Give me till midnight to find out what really happened.’ The tough guys grudgingly relent and leave.

Hugo comes out of the bedroom where he’d been hiding. Olga explains he must tell her everything; maybe she can protect him, persuade the others he is trustworthy after all. ‘Tell me everything, right from the start.’ The stage darkens and now begins the majority of the play, which is told as a long flashback detailing the events leading up to the assassination of Hoederer.

(Setting up the threat of Hugo’s ‘liquidation’ in the present is a Hitchcock-like trick, like seeing the bomb being placed on the bus: everything that happens subsequently is charged with menace and suspense. Simple but effective.)

So the rest of the play shows in detail the build-up to the assassination and explores the very mixed motives of young Hugo the assassin.

Act II

It is 1942, Hugo has broken with his rich bourgeois family to join the People’s Party. As a callow young intellectual, he has been given the task of editing the party paper and is horribly intimidated by the ‘real men’ of action who surround him.

After a turbulent meeting of the party heads Louis explains to him and Olga that the party’s general secretary, Hoederer, is planning to sell the party out. He is persuading the central committee to go into an alliance with the Fascists and the bourgeois party after the war to create a government of national unity.

Olga and Hugo can’t believe he is a sell-out. Louis hesitates then lets them in on a plan to assassinate Hoederer. Hugo will get a job as Hoederer’s personal secretary. On a night to be arranged he will open the door to the assassins. Hugo bridles: he wants to be a man of action. Let him assassinate Hoederer. Louis hesitates but Olga speaks up for Hugo: let him. OK, says Louis. Pack your bags and take your new young wife, Jessica, with you (oh, he’s married, we realise). Move into Hoederer’s house. Become his secretary. Await orders.

The next few acts introduce us to the shrewd watchful Hoederer, surrounded by tough guy bodyguards (George, Slick and Leon). But by far the most interesting character is Jessica, Hugo’s attractive flighty nineteen-year-old wife. She and Hugo play baby games, play act, role play and neither are sure when the game is over or when they’re playing. This could have been a tiresome embodiment of Sartre’s ideas about people playing roles for others’ consumption, but in fact their young married flirting and flyting is done with a surprisingly light touch and I found very believable. It is Huis Clos but in a comic mode. When Hugo swears Jessica to secrecy then whispers that he’s here to assassinate Hoederer, Jessica bursts out laughing. Hugo’s plight is that no-one will take him seriously. He can’t even take himself seriously.

HUGO: Tell it to me now.
JESSICA: What?
HUGO: That you love me.
JESSICA: I love you.
HUGO: But mean it.
JESSICA: I love you.
HUGO: But you don’t really mean it.
JESSICA: What’s got into you? Are you playing?
HUGO: No, I’m not playing.
JESSICA: Then why did you ask me that? That’s not like you.
HUGO: I don’t know. I need to think that you love me. I have a right to that. Come on, say it.
Say it as if you meant it.
JESSICA: I love you. I love you. No: I love you. Oh, go to the devil! Let’s hear you say it.
HUGO: I love you.
JESSICA: You see, you don’t say it any better than I do. (Act III, p.156)

The next scene is set in Hoederer’s office, the representatives of the two other parties arrive, the Fascists and the Liberals. There is some interesting political analysis as Hoederer points out to the other two that, with the USSR on the horizon, the Proletariat Party, though numerically in a minority, will soon be supported by the conquering Reds: so they’d better do a deal now. At which point Hugo jumps to his feet, outraged that Hoederer is prepared to do a deal with the bourgeois he so despises, with the bourgeois party leader (Karsky) who actually knows Hugo’s own father and made a point of mentioning it to Hugo on the way in.

The bomb

Hugo is on the verge of pulling out his revolver and shooting Hoederer then and there, when a bomb goes off in the garden, shattering the window, throwing the characters to the floor. The political leaders are ushered into a safe room, leaving Hugo, the bodyguards and a terrified Jessica. There is now some dramatic irony because Hugo had blurted out ‘the dirty bastards’ just as the bomb went off. He was describing the cynical politicians making this stitch-up, as he worked himself up to shooting, but now has to pretend to Hoederer’s suspicious bodyguards that he was referring to the ‘dirty bastards’ who threw the bomb. In fact Hoederer had already (unwisely) given Hugo a few drinks before the politicians arrived, and now he has a few more to recover from the shock with the result that he gets hammered and starts drunkenly skirting round the fact that it is he who has been sent as an assassin.

They’re not particularly subtle, but these scenes where the callow Hugo teeters on the brink of giving himself away, unhappily revealing himself to be precisely the over-talkative intellectual he’s trying to stop being, while his quick-witted wife covers for him, are more dramatically complex and satisfying than anything in Sartre’s previous plays, whose characters have tended to be schematic and one-dimensional.

In particular, Jessica’s innocent quick-wittedness is a joy to behold. In an earlier scene, when Hoederer’s goons had insisted on searching the new arrivals’ room, Jessica had quick-wittedly hidden Hugo’s revolver in her dress and brazenly invited one of the bodyguards to search her who was, as a result, so red-faced that he only did a cursory job, not finding the gun.

Now Jessica quickly interprets Hugo’s drunken babblings as anger against the ‘dirty bastards’ who threw the bomb and devises other ways of masking what Hugo’s saying. In fact she encourages him to drink more, lots more, until he passes out and Slick and George just laugh at him, thanking their lucky stars they didn’t have a rich privileged upbringing.

Olga in the summerhouse

Cut to the summerhouse which is Jessica and Hugo’s quarters, and Olga is tending the unconscious Hugo, when Jessica returns to the room with a cold compress for his head. The two women confront each other over Hugo’s unconscious body – the scheming, hard, political woman versus the politically naive but sensuous and sharp woman. They wake a groggy Hugo and Olga tells him it was she who threw the bomb. The party’s getting impatient. It’s been ten days and Hoederer’s still alive. She came to finish the job off but botched it. Hugo’s got till tomorrow, then they’ll come en masse. Anyway, whatever happens, the party thinks Hugo’s sold out – he is in big trouble. Being blown up by the bomb would have done him a favour. Olga leaves, climbing over the wall and escaping.

Jessica confronts Hugo with the reality of what he’s promised. For the first time they’re not playing. Hugo admits he can’t believe it, can’t believe he’s a killer, can’t believe that Hoederer’s bright quick eyes will go dull, that blood will seep into his suit, all because he, Hugo, has pulled a trigger. He is over-thinking and over-imagining the deed. But Jessica is no Lady MacBeth; the opposite, she begs Hugo to reconsider and, instead of just murdering Hoederer, discuss the issues, arguing him out of whatever it is that Hugo so vehemently opposes.

At which moment there’s a knock on the door and Hoederer himself enters, to check up on his secretary. The goons told him he’s drunk himself unconscious: is he alright? Having made certain, Hoederer makes as if to leave but Jessica jumps up before him. Now, now is the time for Hugo to do it? For a moment we the audience and Hugo are flabbergasted: what? shoot Hoederer now? No, Jessica means now is the time for the two men to talk, to thrash out their differences, for Hugo to find out if it’s really necessary to kill Hoederer (Jessica obviously doesn’t say this out loud, but we know from the previous dialogue with Hugo that’s this is what she means).

Hoederer explains Realpolitik to Hugo

And this is the lead-in to a very enjoyable scene where Hoederer a) explains the political situation in Illyria b) explains why a political deal with the other parties is necessary c) taunts Hugo with his naive intellectual purity. He’s more interested in principles than men, Hoederer taunts. He doesn’t want to get his pretty little bourgeois hands dirty. Well, Hoederer’s hands are dirty all right, covered in blood and filth.

This works very well as drama; it is written really effectively with Hoederer’s arguments battering Hugo’s feeble denials. When Hoederer has left, even Jessica can see that his arguments were right and, worse, that Hugo knows it, despite all his denials, despite his intention to stay true to his original mission, Hoederer converted him.

But I was also fascinated by Hoederer’s analysis of the situation in this fictional East European country because it closely parallels the analyses of the post-war communist takeover of Europe I have just read in Anne Applebaum’s brilliant history, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 to 1956. Hoederer argues that:

The Proletariat Party cannot take power by itself; the proletariat only make up 20% of the population and not even all of them support the party. Hugo naively says, “Let’s seize power.” Hoederer replies that if they seized power, they would quickly be suppressed by the Peasants Party which represents 55% of the population, in alliance with the Fascists who control the army and police.
Hence the need to enter power peaceably in a national coalition.
Hoederer has suggested to the leaders of the Fascists and Bourgeois parties that they set up a national government with six on the council and the Proletariat Party will have three of those delegates. He even – and this chimes exactly with Applebaum’s description – wouldn’t want most of the ministries, just two: the interior and defence, because those are the only two that matter.
“But,” Hugo says, “the Red Army will be across our borders in weeks: why don’t we ride their coat-tails to power?” “Because, my naive friend,” replies Hoederer, “they will still have to fight their way across the country and many will be killed; the Soviets will be blamed. And because the Party will forever afterwards be thought to have been imposed by a foreign power rather than rising up to represent the people. And because, even for the national unity government, the country will be a wasteland when peace finally comes, difficult decisions about law and order will have to be taken; the Party can represent itself as a natural outgrowth of the nation and people, and can present itself as opposing these unpopular policies from within government. With control of key industries it can slowly isolate the leaders of the other parties and wait till the time is right to stage a coup.”

Hugo hates all this because it is messy and unprincipled and yuk. Hoederer laughs at his naivety and bourgeois prissiness.

Act VI

Next day, the day of the deadline Olga told Hugo he must act or else. Before the working day begins Jessica comes into Hoederer’s office and after a little flirting reveals that Hugo has a gun, and has been tasked with assassinating him. Hoederer knew it all along. Hugo knocks at the door, Jessica exits through the window (reminding me of all the entrances and exits through windows in The Respectful Prostitute).

Now Hoederer toys with Hugo, continuing the discussion over whether Hugo has it in him to be an assassin or whether he is too much of an intellectual. Because assassins don’t think at all, have no imagination, just kill. Whereas Hugo has too much imagination, can not only picture the dead body and the blood, but has grasped the political consequences, the cause of the Party set back, no single leader to greet the Red Army, its chance for power maybe irrevocably lost. He deliberately turns his back and fixes a cup of coffee, while Hugo gets the gun out his pocket and holds it trembling, very obviously struggling with himself. Hoederer turns, faces him, says “Give me the gun,” and takes it. Hugo collapses, virtually in tears, and says, “You despise me.”

Hoederer says he remembers being a naive principled young man. He can help Hugo to maturity, guide him, mentor him. Hugo is almost in tears. But he won’t give up his opposition to the political pact. Don’t worry, says Hoederer: he’ll go to town tomorrow and square it all with Louis (the guy who sent Hugo in the first place). Go back to writing, it’s what you do best; and he dismisses Hugo.

Re-enter Jessica who’s been perched on the window ledge all this time (!) She heard everything. She thinks Hoederer is noble. In fact, she’s realised she’s not in love with her silly immature husband, she realises she wants a ‘real man’ (p.232). Oh dear. The 21st century reader’s heart sinks a little. They look at each other in silence. She’s never thrilled to a man’s touch, sex with her husband makes her giggle. “Are you frigid?” Hoederer asks. “I don’t know,” Jessica replies. “Let’s find out,” says Hoederer and embraces and kisses her.

At just this moment Hugo re-enters the office. Oops. Incensed, he accuses Hoederer of lying to him and stringing him along and sparing him and promising to make him a man because all along he’s just wanted his wife. Hugo springs for the desk where the revolver was left, seizes it, Jessica screams, Hugo fires three shots at Hoederer who crumples in his chair. Enter the bodyguards, George and Slick with guns aimed at Hugo but Hoederer with his dying breath tells them to spare him, it was a crime of passion, that he – Hoederer – was sleeping with Hugo’s wife. And dies.

Act VII

Lights go up on the setting of the first act, as Hugo finishes pouring his heart out to Olga. She keeps asking, “So did you assassinate him because of our orders,?” and Hugo honestly doesn’t know. In a typically Sartrean way, Hugo isn’t even sure that he did it: or was Chance the key agent? If he’d opened the door two minutes later or earlier, it wouldn’t have happened. In fact, he was coming back to ask for Hoederer’s help.

It was an assassination without an assassin. (p.234)

Hugo is crushed by a characteristically Sartrean sense of his own unreality. But Olga is pleased. She thinks she can fend off the men who want to kill him. And here comes the punchline, the cynical climax of the play. For Olga explains:

The party line has changed. When they despatched Hugo to murder Hoederer communications with Moscow were poor. Later they discovered that Moscow did, in fact, want the party to go into a government of national unity with the Fascists and bourgeois parties. It would mean saving many lives among the Illyrian army (which would immediately lay down its arms). It would save Moscow embarrassment with the Allies (Britain and the US). The new plan is for the party to join a 6-man government, and the party to have 3 delegates. Hugo is amazed and then bursts out laughing. This is exactly what Hoederer intended, what we saw him proposing to Hugo just a few moments (and two years) ago down to the last detail.

“Yes,” Olga explains, “but Hoederer was ‘premature’ in his policy.” Meanwhile, another man, now dead, has been officially blamed for Hoederer’s assassination. Now Hoederer has been rehabilitated and… Hugo joins in, “You’re going to put up statues to him after the war. You’re going to make him a hero of the party?” Hugo collapses into helpless tear-filled laughter of despair.

Olga tells him to snap out of it, the Party killers are about to arrive. She is ready to tell them he is a new man, rehabilitated, he will go along with the party line, he will lie about Hoederer’s assassination, he will forget all about and never mention to anyone that he did it. He will live a life of deceit and lies for the greater good.

But Hugo refuses. The only thing that kept him going in prison was that he fired – maybe for personal reasons – but in accordance with the party line. To learn that the line has changed and the act become completely meaningless is too much to bear. He thought that killing someone would make him feel real, give him weight and substance – but he carried on feeling horribly unreal and contingent. Now, now he has the chance to stand up, to act for himself, to make himself real. Olga begs him to stop but as the killer’s car draws up outside, Hugo stands up and walks to the door. He will proclaim his guilt and force them to kill him. It will be his final, defining acte.

Thoughts

Apparently the big and powerful Communist Party of France disliked the play. You can see why.

In purely political terms, this was the decade when Moscow’s concept of Socialist Realism came to be enforced all across the Eastern Bloc. Art, music, literature, all had to be high-minded and inspiring, showing happy workers exceeding their quotas and merrily bringing in the harvest. It’s hard to imagine a more nihilistic, defeatist, cynical and plain anti-communist narrative than Les Mains Sales, hard to imagine anything more completely contrary to the spirit of Socialist Realism, focusing as it does on the amoral political manoeuvring, the lying to its membership, the cynical alliances with its class enemies, and the pointless infighting and murders of the communist party.

Politics aside, the communist party of Illyria comes over as a mob of gangsters, little different in terms of threat and violence from Al Capone and Chicago gangsters of Prohibition. Time and again I am reminded that Sartre and Camus were writing their intense, man-holding-gun fictions during not only the rather obvious violence of the Second World War, but also during the heyday of Hollywood films noirs which they both hugely enjoyed. Camus cultivated a Humphrey Bogart look with his collar turned up and a Gitanes cigarette permanently smouldering in his mouth. The romance, the glamour of being the dude with the shooter, calling the shots. Specially if you yourself are mostly the chap in the library with the pipe and the thick glasses.

As a specimen of intellectual French film noir, as a dissection of the worldview of communist politics in 1947 and 1948, and as pure entertainment, I think les Mains Sales is by far the best of these four plays.

Jessica and sexism

All the male characters utter contemptuously sexist comments either about Jessica in her absence, or to her face, which would get you locked up nowadays. They casually refer to her political naivety, her inability to do anything significant for the Revolution and her liability as distracting ‘bait’ for all the male characters. This was, after all, 20 years or so before the birth of Women’s Liberation / second wave feminism.

It is, for example, offensive to modern readers when the bodyguards make remarks about Jessica’s attractiveness in the first scene in the big house, and Hoederer is no better, dismissing her as a distraction, saying why doesn’t she ‘scratch her itch’ with Slick or George.

More to the point, there is something sexist about the entire conception of the play which sets the world of passive sensuality (Jessica) against the ‘active’ network of male politics and action (Hugo and Hoederer). With crashing stereotyping the main woman character represents Sex, anti-Politics (although, to be fair, she is balanced by clever calculating Olga, who is smart enough to try and save Hugo, and who, after all, throws a bomb in the middle of the play.)

But despite what we nowadays would describe as the #everydaysexism of the text, Jessica is, by and large, the most attractive character in the play. She is the least hoodwinked, the least deceived. She knows nothing about politics but she knows more about life than her over-intellectual husband, tricks the bodyguards with her nimble-wittedness, and is quite a match for Hoederer. She is the only one who sees through the men with all their high-handed rhetoric to ask the real questions, specifically; why does Hugo want to murder a man he respects and, by the end of the play, has come to love? Why? Fool!

Although it’s ostensibly a play about tough guy men politicking and conspiring, Jessica is – for me – the star of the show.

The movie

Despite being ‘the philosopher of the century’ it’s damn difficult to get hold of the movie versions of Sartre’s plays. The Respectful Prostitute seems impossible to track down in any shape or form. Here’s a print of the film version of Les Mains Sales, made in France in 1951. There are no sub-titles and the sound is out of synch for a lot of it, but it gives a stark sense of how stagey the story is. And how French.

Apparently, the French Communist Party were so angry about the play that they tried to organise a boycott of cinemas where the film was showing.

Credit

Les Main Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre was first performed in Paris in April 1948. This English translation – Dirty Hands by Lionel Abel – was published in the United States in 1949. Page references are to the 1989 Vintage paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

Sartre reviews
Camus reviews
The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre versus Camus by Andy Martin (2012) an entertaining history and comparison of the two famous frenemies

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by Simon on October 24, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in France, French literature, Politics, Theatre

Posted by Simon on October 24, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/dirty-hands-jean-paul-sartre/

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All posts tagged Louis

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

Children

Starting time and place

Structure

No dialogue

Aspergers syndrome?

Section 1. Childhood (13 pages)

Section 2. School days (29 pages)

Section 3. University (21 pages)

Section 4. Dinner for Percival (25 pages)

Section 5. Percival’s death (10 pages)

Section 6. Success and babies (11 pages)

Section 7. Middle age (16 pages)

Section 8. Lunch at Hampton Court (19 pages)

Section 9. Bernard’s recap (40 pages)

Sex

Mental illness, dissociation and fragile identity(ies)

Unstoppable images

Identity(ies)

The Bloomsbury Error

Death and travel as basic narrative devices

Secondary characters

Conclusion

Credit

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Tea

The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh

The Wolves of Cernogratz

Louis

The Guests

The Penance

The Phantom Luncheon

A Bread and Butter Miss

Bertie’s Christmas Eve

Forewarned

The Interlopers

Quail Seed

Canossa

The Threat

Excepting Mrs. Pentherby

Mark

The Hedgehog

The Mappined Life

Fate (Clovis Sangrail)

The Bull

Morlvera

Shock Tactics (Clovis Sangrail)

The Seven Cream Jugs

The Occasional Garden

The Sheep

The Oversight (Clovis Sangrail)

Hyacinth

The Purple of the Balkan Kings

The Cupboard of the Yesterdays

For the Duration of the War

Themes

The role of animals in Saki’s short stories

The role of ‘abroad’

Children

Not limited to Edwardian upper classes but told in an upper class tone of voice

Political stories

Suffragettes

Real alienation

An annotated Saki

Comic similes

Related links

Saki’s works

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Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948)

The plot

Act I